With an election on the horizon, President Obama and his administration are employing age-old political diversionary tactics to keep the American public from focusing on the dismal condition of our economy. Call in a four-alarm fire on the south side while they rob the bank on the north side. Al Capone lives.

With the economic train wreck they have engineered, it’s hard to blame Mr. Obama for his misdirection scramble.

Obama and company’s runaway political spin, sleight-of-hand tricks and smoke-and-mirrors games will only work for so long. Con men who sell snake oil are eventually exposed.

The truth will ultimately take center stage. When it does, the Obama administration’s economic flimflam jig will be up.

Mr. Obama owns the lingering recession lock, stock and barrel. He can try to blame everybody but the Wizard of Oz, bob and weave, dodge, lie, obfuscate and deflect that reality, but he will win or lose the election based on the economy.

Mr. Obama and his proxies are telling the American public that unemployment is decreasing. Serious people know that’s a sham, pure political snake oil.

The truth is that if the unemployed, those who have given up looking for work, and the underemployed are added together, that number is probably over 20 percent, not the 8.2 percent unemployment rate touted by the Obama administration.

Say what he will in deceptive rants about staving off economic collapse, the truth is that the president’s $800 billion stimulus didn’t stimulate anything except the debt and an increased hue and cry from the bloodsuckers who like being in the liability column of America. Add to that economic suicide ruse the Solyndra scandal and various assorted crony crimes by this administration, and the fundamental transformation via the Cloward-Piven playbook is clearly on the fast track.

There has been little, if any, growth in the private sector during Mr. Obama’s tenure. Small businesses, the engine of our economy, want nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s suicidal vision as evidenced by the fact they are not growing or hiring. Who can blame them?

One in 7 Americans are now on food stamps. This depressing number does not bode well for Mr. Obama.

With more than 20 percent of Americans drowning in economic hard times, many of them have had to foreclose on their homes. One quarter of all mortgages are at risk of foreclosure. Those who lose a job and then lose a home are not a political base any president would want.

Filling up your tank with $3.90-a-gallon gas is painful and ugly. Some are forecasting the price at the pump will rise to $5 or more this summer. Americans would do well to remember the price at the pump has more than doubled since the “the cost of energy will necessarily skyrocket under my policies” president was elected.

There is no economic recovery, Americans are not better off, incomes have not risen. The whole world can see how America’s economy is stuck in the mud. Happy days aren’t even close to being here again.

Even though he inherited a shaky economy, from Day One of his administration the president has run toward the wrong economic end zone and exacerbated our economic problems.

Instead of focusing on sound and proven policies that grow the economy, his economic platform has strangled economic growth.

The president is either clueless about how to get the economy moving again or he believes America will be better off with a European socialist form of government. Saul Alinsky is at the helm.

If the Titanic were sinking today and the president was on board, he would grab a leaky bucket to bail water and claim his bailout policy is saving the ship from sinking.

The world will see in November whether there are more rugged individual producers or more uncaring bloodsuckers in the last, best place. America would do well to stick with New Hampshire’s slogan: “Live free or die.”

Ted Nugent is an American rock ‘n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns & Rock ‘N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).